Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (44 page)

TO DESCRIBE MEPKIN
Abbey in eastern South Carolina as heavenly is far too easy, but goodness is this place gorgeous. Thirty miles north of Charleston, the three-thousand-acre estate was given as a gift to the Catholic Church in 1949 by publishing magnate Henry Luce and his wife, Clare Boothe, and it’s now run by Trappist monks.

“No matter how stressful my day has been,” Thomas Ashe Lockhart tells me while making a turn off Dr. Evans Road into a long, tree-lined driveway, “the moment I come through these gates, all of my cares go away.”

Lockhart is the great-great-great-great grandson of Henry Laurens, a South Carolinian aristocrat who owned Mepkin for thirty years during the latter part of the eighteenth century. Laurens’s funeral here in December 1792 might have been more symbolic than consequential, but it represented the beginning of a trend that has fundamentally altered how Americans dispose of their bodies and choose to be memorialized.

We park near the gift shop, and Tom, a spry eighty-one-year-old attorney originally from North Carolina, guides me across lush, rolling lawns bordered by giant oaks draped in Spanish moss. We pass through a small forest and up a hill to the brick-walled enclosure where Henry Laurens and his family are buried. Along the way, Tom has been sharing with me a biographical sketch of the man he refers to as “one of America’s most overlooked Founding Fathers.”

“Did you know that Laurens kept George Washington from being fired during the Revolution?” he asks me.

I did not. I knew that Washington had his critics, but I wasn’t aware that he came close to being removed as commander. Leading the charge, Tom tells me, was Thomas Conway, an Irish-born general serving in the Continental Army who became peeved at Washington for delaying his promotion to major general. He and other officers, including Washington’s former aide-de-camp Thomas Mifflin, questioned Washington’s leadership abilities after the Army had suffered a string of early defeats, and they pushed for General Horatio Gates to replace him when Gates’s troops beat the British at Saratoga. (Gates
received all the glory, but Major General Benedict Arnold, in his pre-traitorous days, also deserved credit for the win, and this lack of recognition was one of many slights that turned Arnold against his country.) Henry Laurens helped quash the mini rebellion with assistance from the Marquis de Lafayette, and Conway was demoted. He continued badmouthing Washington until General John Cadwalader challenged him to a duel to shut him up once and for all. Cadwalader did so literally, shooting Conway in the mouth.

“Imagine the war without Washington,” Tom says, “or if he’d never been president. Laurens saved him.”

The third of six children, Henry Laurens was born on March 6, 1724, in Charleston, South Carolina. At age twenty-three he launched what became a lucrative import/export company that bought and sold everything from furniture, dyes, and rum to animal pelts, white indentured servants, and African slaves. Tom emphasizes to me that Laurens withdrew from the slave trade before the Revolution.

In the summer of 1750, Laurens married nineteen-year-old Eleanor Ball. None of their first three children lived past infancy. John Laurens, born in 1754, was the first to survive into maturity. Five years later came Martha, who was stricken with smallpox during an epidemic in 1760 and pronounced dead. But while preparing her body for burial, Martha’s doctor made the astonishing discovery that she was in fact still conscious, and, after several days of vigilant care, she recovered fully. Henry Laurens was elated but also shaken by how close Martha had come to being buried alive, and the experience left a deep impression on him.

Laurens entered public life in 1757, serving first in South Carolina’s Common House Assembly. He was initially cool to the idea of America breaking from the Motherland and pushed for reconciliation, but after British troops attacked South Carolina and the Declaration of Independence was signed, his support for the Revolution became unwavering. In January 1777 he was voted into the Continental Congress, and later that year his fellow representatives unanimously elected him president.

Laurens resigned as president of the Continental Congress in December 1778 and accepted a diplomatic assignment to solicit $10 million (and those are eighteenth-century dollars) in war funding from the Dutch. He was also responsible for negotiating a long-term treaty of “amity and commerce” with the Netherlands. While rounding the coast of Newfoundland en route to Europe, Laurens’s ship was captured by the British. Laurens stuffed sensitive documents into weighted sacks and pitched them overboard, but English sailors easily fished the bobbing bundles out of the sea. Inside they found a list of prominent Dutchmen sympathetic to American independence, along with the proposed treaty. Great Britain declared war on the Netherlands and accused Laurens of high treason. Fifty-six years old and suffering from gout, he was shipped to England and confined to the Tower of London.

“The ‘Constable of the Tower,’ ” Tom says to me, “was officially the British general Lord Cornwallis. When Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the man he handed his sword to was Lieutenant Colonel John Laurens, Henry’s son. Cornwallis was swapped for Laurens in a prisoner-of-war exchange, and he came back to Mepkin in 1784 after spending some time in Paris.”

“Laurens led quite a life,” I say to Tom, who nods in agreement.

And it was a life made even more historic by how it ended. “Having settled all affairs which relate to my estate and provided for the different parts of my family in a manner which appears to me to be just and equitable, I come to the disposal of my own person,” Laurens wrote in his will. “I solemnly enjoin it upon my son as an indispensable duty that as soon as he conveniently can after my decease, he cause my body to be wrapped in twelve yards of town cloth
and burnt until it be entirely and totally consumed
” (emphasis added). These instructions aren’t remarkable today, but in the 1700s they were unprecedented; before Laurens, no American had been cremated per his—or her—request, and on December 8, 1792, Laurens became the first.

This distinction is often bestowed on Joseph De Palm, an elderly New Yorker cremated in Pennsylvania on December 6, 1876, but Laurens remains the real trailblazer, so to speak. De Palm, it’s true, was the
first to be incinerated by a crematorium (Laurens went up in smoke atop an outdoor pyre), and his send-off is better documented because it was viewed by a gaggle of doctors, clergymen, scientists, and several dozen reporters, some of whom had traveled from Europe. Laurens’s cremation was held privately here at Mepkin and attended solely by loved ones. Whether family members felt that the spectacle was too dreadful to relate or were embarrassed that Laurens had picked a burial rite normally associated with pagans and Native Indians isn’t clear, but apparently not one witness wrote about the cremation. His daughter Martha refrained from mentioning it in an otherwise detailed letter she sent her husband after the funeral, although she later referred to it, once, as “that awful ceremony.”

The only contemporary account I could find describing it was printed in a London newspaper:

Squinting to see if there’s a cross or some other religious icon on Laurens’s faded headstone and finding none, I ask Tom if Laurens considered himself a religious man.

“Absolutely,” Tom says. “He was a devout Episcopalian from a long line of Huguenots.”

I thought Laurens might have been an atheist or agnostic only because Americans’ long-standing aversion to cremation was based primarily on their Christian beliefs. Many feared that it was eternally irrevocable and would prevent their corporal resurrection on Judgment Day, and the whole idea of having one’s body cast into flames evoked
unsettling thoughts of hellfire. Orthodox Jews deemed the practice sacrilegious and still reject it, as do most Muslims.

European attitudes began to shift during the 1870s, roughly 1,550 years after Rome’s first Christian ruler, Constantine I, had banned cremations throughout the empire. In 1873, Queen Victoria’s personal surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson, was roaming the World Exhibition in Vienna when he came upon a crematorium displayed by an Italian professor of anatomy named Bruno Brunetti. Convinced that corpses emitted “deleterious” gases and leaked infectious fluids into wells and groundwater, Thompson had already been pondering ways to hygienically dispose of human bodies after death, and Brunetti’s brick-encased furnace seemed to offer the perfect solution. Thompson returned to England and wrote a lengthy treatise advocating for the widespread use of crematoriums as a public health measure, and he suggested that there would be an economic bonus, too: Not only would funerals be less expensive, but the ashes could be sold as fertilizer. Thompson’s 1874 essay garnered international attention and helped kick-start the cremationist movement in England and America.

Among those influenced in the States was a Washington, Pennsylvania, philanthropist and doctor named Francis Julius LeMoyne, who shared Thompson’s conviction that rotting corpses caused “the graveyard pollution of air and water.” Wealthy but frugal, LeMoyne believed that funerals and their accompanying expenses (coffins, flowers, undertaker’s fees, et cetera) were becoming unnecessarily extravagant and wasteful, and he was drawn to cremation’s simplicity and cost-effectiveness. So, during the summer and fall of 1876, LeMoyne spent $1,500 of his own money to construct America’s first crematorium. He originally wanted to place the thirty-by-twenty-foot red-brick structure inside Washington’s main graveyard, but town trustees dismissed the idea out of hand, leaving him with no other option but to build it on his personal estate.

An article about LeMoyne caught the attention of Henry Steel Olcott, a well-known Manhattan lawyer and U.S. Army colonel who
had served on the commission responsible for investigating Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Raised Presbyterian, Olcott had turned to Eastern faiths in his early forties and found special comfort in the idea that cremation freed one’s soul after death. Olcott didn’t care that LeMoyne’s intentions were based more on health and economical reasons than religious ones. What mattered to him most was that once LeMoyne finished his crematorium he would need a body to burn, and Olcott, as luck would have it, already had one on hand.

Baron Joseph De Palm was over seventy years old and ailing when Olcott first met him in 1875. The two New Yorkers held similar views on religion and became such close friends that De Palm made Olcott executor of his will, which stipulated that his funeral would be organized “in a fashion that would illustrate the Eastern notions of death and immortality” and would culminate in his cremation. De Palm passed away on May 20, 1876, and Olcott had his body injected with arsenic, a short-term preservative, until LeMoyne was ready for him. That took longer than expected, so Olcott brought in a mortician named August Buckhorst to keep De Palm from wasting away. Embalming was a relatively new practice in the States, with no set standards or regulations, and undertakers pretty much winged it. Buckhorst smeared De Palm’s skin and replaced most of his innards with a potter’s clay and carbolic acid mixture that proved surprisingly effective.

Six and a half months after De Palm died, LeMoyne’s crematorium was at long last finished, and on December 5, 1876, Olcott escorted his old friend’s withered but still presentable corpse by train to Washington, Pennsylvania. The next morning, invited guests crammed into the viewing room as Olcott meticulously prepared De Palm for the furnace. First he doused the white sheet around De Palm’s body with water and alum to keep the fabric from instantly burning off and exposing anything that might scandalize the more genteel folks in attendance. Then, to mask the inevitable stench of burning skin, he sprinkled De Palm with spices, flowers, and evergreen sprigs. With the aid of four other men, Olcott and LeMoyne carried De Palm across the room and placed him headfirst into the retort. No eulogies or
prayers were offered, but to show their respect the gentlemen did doff their hats.

For all intents and purposes the event went off without a hitch. Olcott and LeMoyne didn’t set the building on fire. Nobody fainted, freaked out, or tried to disrupt the proceedings. And De Palm’s body didn’t explode (as one
New York Times
correspondent predicted) or end up as a grotesque clump of unevenly cooked flesh, bone, and hair.

Journalists on the scene were, nevertheless, unanimously critical. The kindest dubbed the affair a “disappointment” and “folly,” while the harshest blasted it as a revolting desecration of everything holy, more “pig roast” than civilized ceremony. The story generated ample coverage but had to compete with the news that two hundred Manhattan theatergoers burned to death in a fire that same day. “The greater cremation weakened public interest in the lesser,” Olcott later pouted in his journal.

Henry Laurens’s cremation eighty-four years earlier didn’t exactly prompt a craze of copycats (Laurens was, however, an inspiration to nineteenth-century cremationists), but De Palm’s actually threatened to derail the movement for years. Despite their respectable titles, Dr. LeMoyne, Colonel Olcott, and Baron De Palm were depicted in the press as a bunch of wackos. LeMoyne had already been pegged an “eccentric” and “radical” for his progressive social positions—for example, his belief that women and African Americans deserved the same rights as white men—but he did have his peculiarities. Ironically, the man who espoused cremations on public health grounds wasn’t big on personal hygiene himself. LeMoyne abhorred taking baths and purportedly cleaned his body by gently scraping it with a table knife.

Olcott and De Palm were considered crackpots for their unorthodox spiritual beliefs and because of their association with New York’s Theosophical Society, which Olcott had cofounded to promote interest in paranormal and mystical phenomena, particularly mediumistic communication—that is, conversing with the dead. There’s no word, alas, on whether or not Olcott tried to chat with De Palm in a post-cremation séance.